The source of your admin problem is:
In the alias file for each domain, DA creates an alias for the domain owmer:
owner: owner
This forwarder essentially says all mail addressed to "
[email protected]" will forward to user id "owner". Therefore, the reason you have admin as an address for all of your domains is that you configured your domains as owned by user admin. You may be able to solve the problem by manually editing the alias file for each domain and changing the admin forwarder to forward to a different user or to another email address. I am not sure because I haven't tried. The DA virtual POP for the owning user may interfere. I avoided the problem because I created a special user id and placed all of my domains under that user id. The forwarder for this id doesn't really matter, because it receives no email unless I send to it. I would recommend never having user admin own any domains except the master domain. (Actually, I would like to change the owner of that domain as well)
In the simplest of all possible worlds, an email address like
[email protected] would end up in the mailbox of user Joe at the domain somedomain.com. However, MTAs let you route mail any way you like, so this model is long outdated. I personally N-E-V-E-R disclose my user ids as email addresses. I always use aliases as email addresses. The owning userid of my domains is never known by anybody outside my system, so does not receive email unless I send email to it. DA complicates the picture somewhat with virtual POP accounts. I don't use POP for email and I discovered after some experimentation that my IMAP client does not like DA virtual POPs, so I threw away all of the virtual POPs I had created, and instead created for IMAP purposes a set of actual user accounts (using the shell adduser command). (Again, these users are known only inside my system) Therefore, I have no experience to share with respect to how forwarding behaves with virtual POPs.
DA will only configure forwarders to email addresses. It will not allow you to configure a forwarder that forwards to a user account other than the domain owner. To get around this I configured forwarders that forward from
[email protected] to a fictitious email address like
[email protected]. Forwarders for domain1 are stored in file \etc\virtual\domain1.com\aliases. I inserted this entry in alphabetic order into this file:
fictitious: ActualUser1, ActualUser2
As a result of these settings, Exim follows the forwarding chain [
[email protected]] --> [
[email protected]] --> [ActualUser1,ActualUser2]. Where ActualUser1 and ActualUser2 are user accounts that I want to receive email addressed to
[email protected]. Using this technique you can direct any email address to any userid(s). The advantage of the intermediary "fictitious", is that you can use DA to forward other email addresses to the same userid(s).
Also using this technique, you can route
[email protected] and
[email protected] to different mailboxes. (At least you can if the owning user is not user admin) DA will not complain about entries forwarded to users but it will not allow you to edit them. (Actually, I am getting so much spam sent to admin at each domain that I may just forward it to ":fail:" and give out a more unique alias for admin purposes.)
Hope this all helps someone.
I am using DA on a Fedora server running Exim as the MTA. If you are using something else, you may have to salt to taste.
PS: I am not quite sure why DA will not configure a forwarder to a userid other than the owner of the domain. However, I think it should at least allow administrative users to create this kind of forwarder. Manual editing of the aliases file gets around the problem, but is a small PITA.
